One of the great things about being an author is the being able to kill people and never face any legal consequences. I expect I’m not the only person who looks around at the rest of humanity every now and then and thinks “dear gods, we are a cancerous growth and something must be done about us!”

As an author, I can have a nice big apocalypse from the safety of my own writing space. I have lavished hours of thought and attention on imagining how I want civilization to end its current incarnation. My most recent novel, When We Are Vanished, is to no small degree, me having my cathartic apocalypse. I’m not an especially bloodthirsty person, and I don’t enjoy reading or writing long gore scenes, so I wanted it clean. The title is something of a giveaway here, because in my perfect apocalypse, people just vanish, melting…